The show’s guest in this episode is Angela Johnson. She is an educator, speaker, author and leader in the Agile space. She is located in Minnesota and enjoying working globally thanks to distributed technology.

—

Listen to the podcast here

Organizational Agility with Angela Johnson

Hello I’m Melanie Parish. It’s great to be with you here today. And I’ve been thinking about changing things in my business. And as I think about my leadership today, I’ve been thinking about how do we change something and sort of the longer we’re in business, the more stable things start to feel. And we started have ways we do things. And then when we think of changing them, we have to consider like, what are the implications of that? And so I was just sort of thinking about that. And so we spent some time as a team today, kind of talking about our current reality. What what are we currently doing? What do we like about what we’re currently doing? What do we want to change about what we’re currently doing? We’re looking around our brand and our messaging, and things like that. And I just think it’s interesting to think about, so we looked for both things we really like and things that we think we have opportunity to do better.

And then what we want our values to be that we stand on as we make a change. And I think it’s an interesting way to think about it. I think we as leaders, we often think, Oh, well, we can just change that. And sometimes that’s true. But as the bigger the change, I think the more people I want to involve in asking questions and thinking about how we change and what will that impact and, and so it’s an interesting process to think about how we change. So I just want to ask you, I want to give you a challenge to look at things that you might want to change around the way you work around the way you lead around your organization. And then to give you a challenge to figure out what the processes you want to go through as you think about change. Because I think it’s also interesting to choose your own process, create your own reality, before you just start changing things. Only in like solopreneur ships that are super simple, is it? Can you just change things without any conversation? Which is, wow, how cool is that when you can do that. But as businesses become more mature, they have all these sort of internal structures. And then it’s really interesting to think about how we might change them.

And I am very excited about our guests today. Our guest is Angela Johnson. Angela is located in Minnesota and is enjoying working globally. Angela is an educator, speaker and author and a leader in the agile space,  is a certified scrum trainer and certified less practitioner, and the author of the scrum master files secrets every coach should know.

—

Welcome to the show. Angela.

Thank you so much for having me, Melanie.

Well, it’s super fun to be here with you today. And I usually just dive into our book club segment, because I know that you did a little reading on Chapter Six testing bottlenecks. And I’d love to hear just kind of what your thoughts were, you know, if you relate it to your work or what, you know, how did… how did this land with you?

I did write down a very specific thought there about, you know, that single biggest bottleneck being management attention. And as a small business owner, that really resonates with me, one of the things I don’t want is to be that bottleneck. You know if you can imagine my team members having to say to a customer or even having to say to each other well, we have to wait for Angela. Well, let’s, let’s see what Angela says or let’s see what Angela decides, no, I don’t want to be that bottleneck. So I really want to make sure that we test for those and then that were a little proactive in ensuring that we don’t have them in the first place.

Well, I think I think that’s a really good point. And I know that I just See my clients struggle with this, like, you know, we’ve done Kanban boards with clients, and I actually, like put a column when, when it’s a business, it’s emerging out of a solopreneur ship. And there’s sort of one decision maker, you know, waiting for decisions so that there’s a place that they can go to in their Kanban board. Because that’s, that limits work in progress. And, and, and I work really hard not to be the bottleneck in my company to it. It’s like, oh, let me see what how I can, how I can get out of the way. And one of my favorite ways to get out of the way on this is to make somebody else the leader on everything we do, so that they have full permission to bug me to put themselves in my calendar to, to remove the bottlenecks so that I don’t become the keeper of the bottleneck, they become the keeper of the bottlenecks, so they can push me I don’t know what you do in your organization. I’m sure you have strategies to for how do you how do you get out of your own way?

Yeah, we use a board as well. And we have we’ve named that column blocked, you know, just so that there’s visibility blocked or blockers, you know, to make sure that it there’s visibility to it. Yeah, another thing that we do, because a number of people on the team, coach and train, we kind of tried to drink our own champagne, you know, so as we hear somebody in this just happened today in the office, one of my teammates was talking about not knowing how to do something, and I said yet, and he went, thank you. Thank you. Because it’s like, I don’t know how to do it yet. What would it take you to know how to do it? Do you need help from one of us? Or do you just want to try something? Because your book also talks about experiments? So it’s like, do you want to run an experiment? Or do you want somebody to show you, and then now you can carry the torch from there so that we don’t have a single point of failure or some kind of bottleneck?

I love that. And I love especially thinking about bottlenecks. There’s so many things in business that we don’t know. And, and you you do you get to choose, I like this dichotomy that you’re either choosing to experiment or you’re choosing to go find it best practice is kind of what like you can sometimes do either, like the best practices only the current best practice, there may be a practice that you might find by experimenting. And there’s value to both, you know, you don’t want to be reinventing the wheel all the time in an in your business because or organization, because it’s heavy, it you get tired. I’m sure you’ve worked in startups, and I have, I’ve worked in lots of startups. And it’s like, oh, you know, so and so wore this clothing to work today. Now, we have to create a whole, you know, policy manual on dress code, or, you know, whatever it is, it’s like it one offs all becomes something that you have to create a whole thing from Totally true. respond in the in the moment.

Yeah, you mentioned dress code. And maybe, maybe in this day and age of us being online like this, you know, we can get away with more than we used to get away with. But I remember we had a new team member, and we were meeting at a client site, and it was downtown, you know, in this tall, professional office building and bless her heart, she showed up in yoga pants and a T shirt. And I was, you know, in professional dress, and as we’re meeting each other by the elevator, she just took one look at me and went. And I of course was looking at her going. She said, I didn’t know, we had to dress up. You didn’t tell me we had to dress up. And I’m like, I didn’t know I needed to tell you. All these assumptions, I think it’s kind of at the heart of what you’re talking about. You know, it’s like if we didn’t test for those assumptions early, oh, then they kind of bite us later, you know, when they rear their head?

Well, I’m curious, did you do anything to solve it? Or just went in with the yoga pants?

We went with it? Yeah. And we made it a learning opportunity for the client, because we were there to talk to the client, you know, their leadership team, about different ways of working with their team. So we just made it a point of education.

Oh, there’s different dress styles. And yeah, that’s interesting.

But also as leaders, if they don’t set the expectation, don’t assume, right, people are gonna know.

How would they know? Right? And how would you know?

I mean, let’s, as leaders, we are transparent about it.

Yeah, I think I think it’s really interesting. The other thing that I noticed about that is that the dress code was not the bottleneck probably for doing work with the clients that day. It wasn’t it worked. Okay. It was it was like it would have been nice to look, you know, the right way but it didn’t get in the way didn’t stop the flow. Right. I’m just gonna read a little passage and then we’ll that barriers are different from bottlenecks. Yeah. And this is from the experimental leader. Sometimes leaders experience not a bottleneck, but a barrier, something external beyond your control, or something that happens in the economy that no amount of experimenting will improve. Some barriers resolved quickly, some take more time. Sometimes you can see them coming from far off, sometimes they come out of nowhere. The 2008 recession came out of nowhere for many companies. I think we had a bank failure this week. Yes. Another one coming out of seemingly out of nowhere, although we have them often enough, they become predictable. The 2008 recession came out of nowhere. For most companies, the decrease in business because of the crash was not something that leaders could experiment their way out of, they had to create a new reality to survive. Realizing that a barrier is not a bottleneck can be a good start. These barriers can be stressful and soul sucking, but they happen and they may happen to you, they are a reality of leadership. Learn to know when you’ve hit one, it may feel like the right time to reach for a martini to try to put it all behind you. But after years of coaching leaders, I’m a huge advocate of self care when you hit a wall, you are the most important renewable resource. So yeah, I and this again, you know, as we run our companies, you know, this, this idea of, of leaders being valuable and needing to be cared for, I think is so important, that self care piece.

Yes. And then you did precede it with Martini.

I think a martini can be occasionally medicinal. But I do see sometimes when things go bad i I always worry about the leaders that try to party their way out of it. Yeah. Because I think it it leads to more burnout. Yeah. And we’ve dealt with so many unpredictable things. This, I think we’re in a time now that we’ve people have had to experiment and experiment and to experiment. And I think even if we go back to your illumination of the idea of the management attention, I think people are having a hard time mustering up management attention. One more time for another crisis or another. Another problem to solve it’s, it’s an interesting time that we’re in right now.

For sure, you’re you read about the 2008. Crash, you know what I’m thinking about, you know, it’s 2023, as you and I talk here, but when 2020 when COVID hit the classes our team was teaching, there was even a policy for the certifying body that we belong to that they had to be in person. And so I remember that Friday, the announcement came out that said, Okay, figure out how to flip them all virtual. Oh, yeah, just like that, right. And so we felt like, we didn’t have a choice, you know, we rallied together as a team and said, Okay, there’s a class next week that was supposed to be in person, but let’s get together and run some experiments and how to still pull this off, leveraging virtual tools. And some of my competitors were like, you know, what, I’m gonna wait it out. I’m gonna cancel a few classes. Am I right? I’m glad you laughed, because I was like, there is no way. Like, the CD is out of this bottle, this is gonna be the new normal. So for me, it was like, adapt or die. You know, it’s like, we’ve got to figure out how to attack this barrier. So for me, that was definitely, you know, something that we had to overcome. Whereas, you know, thinking about a bottleneck that might have been, well, Angela can’t be in two places at once. So if you know, Angela, had been scheduled for something, you know, online, and then she also was needed for something in the business that can’t happen. That that I think is, you know, in line with what you described as bottleneck versus barrier.

Yeah, workflow is constrained. You can’t teach one more class because your teacher doesn’t have any more capacity. Well, then you’re going to train up another teacher, you’re, you know, yeah, absolutely. Like, but the flow is already there. The the process is already in place. It’s the flow that’s constructed, as opposed to a cliff, were the thing you did forever. That’s the barrier, like you can’t offer you know, you have a limitation where you have to offer in person classes and all in person classes are canceled.

It’s a grand sample, or even the government can, you know, restraints at that time, you know, locked down and all those things that were going on, and it seemed like policies were changing. I don’t know about your experience, but for us, I felt like policies were changing daily, weekly, and we really needed to be on our toes to make sure that we could still survive through…

I fled Canada at one point they had come out with another lockdown. We had so many lockdowns, five lockdowns or something but we had one that was they had said they were going to check people’s IDs. And if they were too far from home, they were going to ticket them. Oh my goodness. And I was the as an American living in Canada, that was just a bridge too far. It was like too much so scary. I did not, I felt like I was gonna get stuck in Canada, you know, again, and I actually, or I was stuck in Canada, but I also just like, felt like it was too much construction. So I asked my kids at six o’clock at night, I said, Do you want to go to the US to swim? Because they were an online school? And one of them said, Yes. And one of them said no. And we decided we would go and they said, well, when would we go and I said, we’re leaving at 6am in the morning, because I didn’t want to give them time to figure out how to ticket us on our way to the border. So I fled. i It was like too much. I didn’t want that. I did not want that barrier in my life. Right. And we got it. We went to New Mexico, where my father lives, and we stayed with him and and we were there three and a half months, and they finished school and they swam, and they did all sorts of interesting things. And we got to New Mexico, the restaurants were open, the gyms were open, the hot tubs were open. I mean, it was just, it was a whole different experience. There were no barriers. It was such a interesting. It was interesting, because the countries were so different in their approaches. And that we could just walk across the border and have a barrier disappear was so it was such a such a interesting experience. For me, as someone who looks at bottlenecks and barriers and experiments, it was all of those things.

I think this is giving some of the leaders that that you talk, you know, talk to and educate, run for their money too. Because if you look at COVID is kind of an experiment during lockdown as an experiment with working from home. Okay, so now we’ve proven that we can do it right, we can do it. It’s possible. And as businesses are saying, Okay, it’s time to come back. Look at other people going.

I think that’s true. What are your thoughts on that? Like you work with lots lots of people out there? What are your thoughts about online? virtual work? Not virtual work? Like what’s what’s your what’s the truth telling part of you have to say about that I have I have ideas of my own.

At first, I was like, nothing beats in person, nothing beats that experience. And then as I’ve been forced to do some of these virtual trainings, and then even just live online and podcasts like this one, and you know, my own and YouTube channel and stuff like that. It is possible. And we’ve tried to hold in person classes because we have our own event center. So for me, it’s nothing, just open the door, and you know, market a class, and people don’t want to come, everybody’s gotten real comfy being at home. So then I listened to some of my female friends who are also a business owners, and they’re just losing their mind, like their ego is telling them stories that just isn’t true about what their employees may or may not be up to. And so I’m like, don’t you don’t you trust them? And a few of them, their reactions have surprised me? Because they’re like, No, I don’t trust them. Why do they work for you? Well, that would now we’re getting down to it. Now we have a whole different thing to talk about about your business. So I used to be on one side of the fence going in person in person in person. And then I’m not a big fan of 100% online, either. I’ve landed somewhere in the middle bit of balance or both?

Well, I think it’s I think it’s interesting. So I think there are people who are trustworthy working from home, in my experience, and I think there are people who aren’t a great and that’s true of people who work in the office, too. I agree. Yeah, there are people you know, there. I think the stats are, you know, when they’ve actually watched people in survey they, they get, you know, people in the office get about three hours of work done a day by the time they wander around. And you know, and that might be true at home too. And I think we asked more questions about people who are working at home, but I also think there’s been people that are super marginalized by the pandemic. People with children, I think are the ones that have been hit so hard, that even if they were like, super trustworthy in the beginning, it’s really hard to maintain it when every time your kid gets sick, they get sent home, and you’re supposed to somehow be like parent while you’re at work. You can’t take any more time off work. Because why would you because you’re at home, you can probably pull it off. I think there’s some real gray areas still, that as we come out, we have to think about and I think I think we also sort of have relaxed some standards in the pandemic is like, oh, you know that they’re doing the best they can? And I thought maybe okay. I mean, I don’t know, I have lots of thoughts about it that are sometimes judgy. Like, and sometimes I see the same people who, you know, aren’t quite pulling off the freedom. But that’s always been true. Yeah, that some people can have freedom. I have a virtual assistant, who is in the Philippines, and has always been virtual and has since and has always worked at home, and she is the hardest worker I’ve probably ever had in my business. Yeah, so no doubts at all. And, you know, I don’t know if that’s true for everybody. I don’t know if everyone is that motivated? I don’t know if I if I didn’t have a coaching call every hour. I don’t know if I’d be that motivated.

Right. Yeah, I think it really exposes stuff that was already there. You know what I mean? Like you were saying, if that that person just isn’t trustworthy, or you know, they’re not pulling their weight, or they were the person who wandered around and chit chatted, you know, even when they were in the office, I think it’s only exasperated. I think it’s only exposed by being online.

Yeah, well, I want to learn more about your business, too. Thanks. I mean, this is really fun, just to kind of, you know, gossip a little. But um, what tell me about what you’re experimenting with in your work and your life and your business?

Right? Absolutely. Well, I made mention of opening an 8000 square foot training and Event Center. Because pre pandemic, we were getting kind of tired of holding our classes in, you know, dodgy hotel ballrooms and paying $5 for a Canna soda, or, you know, it just was reflecting poorly on our business. So we’re like, Gee, how hard could it be? Or gonna be let’s just open a road. And we were loving having our own space and licensing the space out to other businesses to offset costs. Boom, pandemic, lockdown. Can’t hold any events. Oh, funny thing, the rent is still due. Right? So we’ve we’ve very quickly turned a couple of these little rooms into these studios, so that we could have not only our classes, be online, but have it be a higher quality experience for our students and really figure out how to make that work. And then as the lockdowns lifted, a really interesting thing happened, where a number of business had businesses had given up their own offices, right, let their mortar space go, you know, just because they said you don’t want virtual forever, right? Yeah, let’s let’s save some money on our own costs. Ooh. But when we do need to get together, we do have to have some kind of training and development that still goes on, where can we hold that. So we’ve experienced a little bit of a boom, on our little event center coming back for other people’s use the irony, right, we opened it largely for our own, but the irony is that other people are using it more so so we have lots of little of experiments running there about the different types of businesses that are coming back to use it. And then also people who maybe are a little burned out, working from home, and they just want to stay away from the kids and the pets and things like that, you know, we’re not like a co working space, which locks you into memberships. And sometimes puts you at a table out in the middle, you know, right next to your peers, whether you want to be or not, we have little rooms with doors, little little huddle rooms with doors. And we you know, much like a co working space, put out the snacks and the coffee and all that’s included. But everybody gets their own door. So if they do have a high stakes presentation, or they do just want some time away, they can come and use a room for an hour or they can use it for a day. So we’re running a lot of experiments there to see who our new client in this post kind of COVID-ish era is going to be.

I think that’s all really interesting. And I’m curious, just because I’m always curious, as somebody who is good at Scrum, how do you think of reading your space? Like how do you think of flow and your space?

Yeah, definitely. And for those of your listeners who are like Scrum, what is that on the bottom of my shoe? No, it’s you know, rugby huddle, right, you know, comes out of all the Toyota stuff that I know you talk about in your book as well. The creators of Scrum, just you know, took that rugby analogy further and pull little framework around it. So we very much are like a scrum team. So we’re a cross functional team. And we don’t look at work as Oh, not it. I don’t do that. Here’s the work. It needs to happen, who is available and so at the beginning of every week, we do hold a little planning conversation with each other and we look at what’s on the calendar. In a services business. It is a little different. Because you know, my whole team isn’t here in this interview on your podcast, it’s just me. So Angela’s mark data capacity, because everybody can see on the board and on the calendar. She’s recording with Melanie today. But Angela also made coffee in the training center this morning, Angela also made sure that you know, she was at the front desk, because there was a site visit today that one of her team members is tackling so we have all the work on the board, and then it’s very much a self organizing, self managing way of working.

That’s really cool. It’s I’m glad I asked that question. It’s a fun way to think of it. And I, I love that idea that the work needs to be done. You know, it’s I get really frustrated when I hear like, oh, not my problem, not my job, not not my job description. You know, that might be true. But I, I always think of when I, I do a little bit of hiring, consulting and thinking about hiring and I and I talk about hiring a lot with my clients. And and I always think that the most valuable person to hire is somebody who sees the world that way and thinks of the world that way and will roll up their sleeves and work as a team, no matter what’s on the what’s on your board with what the work is that needs to be done.

We try really hard to practice some of these, you know, values and principles that we teach. So when we hire, we’re very clear that the title is team member. The title is team member. And I literally don’t care what somebody puts on their LinkedIn profile, or calls themselves you know, when it’s time to move on, or when they’re in job search mode. It’s literally making sure that no ego. And so we we try to tell people, it’s like when we use the analogy of everybody here wants to wash his dishes. No, we mean that, literally, there are two dishwashers. And because we try to be green, in our space, we don’t do plastic ware and stuff like that, right. So there’s actually a lot of dishes, there’s actually dishes and flatware. And it’s like, you’re gonna be the one there’s two dishwashers, but somebody’s got to load it and unload it. And if your ego is telling you you don’t do that, this may not be the home for you, this may not be the team for you.

Who else shouldn’t be on your team? What else do you look for when you hire?

So we also look for somebody who not only has that ego, you know, Intel’s themselves that they only do one thing, we also have had a challenge in the past where somebody thinks, you know that they’re all that in a bag of chips, because humility is really important to us. And so we talk about making failures daily. But fail just stands for First attempt in learning. And so when people have come across as kind of preachy or condescending, that doesn’t go well with clients, usually when people want to learn this new way of working, they want to hear about what didn’t work, and they want to hear about the struggles, and they want to hear about what we learned from our own experiments and failures and how we leveraged that. So we really look for an element of humility. And people when we hire.

Hmm, I love it. These are said it’s such an interesting conversation. What should people know about like, when should they seek you out? What do you have to offer the world that they might be interested in?

We are really good at teaching people different ways of working. So yes, we do know Scrum. And yes, we do know Kanban and all those happy things. And if people want to get certified in it, we certainly can offer those things. But sometimes people just want to bring a little more clarity to their own workforce and figure out how to get things moving, whether that’s making work more visible, whether that’s ordering a list, so that there’s no question what’s first, what second, how do they work better together as a team, those are the kinds of things that we excel at helping individuals and companies do.

It’s so interesting, because I’ve worked in with different tech leaders for a long time. So I’m sort of watched the Agile processes or scrum processes. And then I did Seth Godin’s alt MBA program, and he talks all about shipping work. So that you know, which I also love because you know, until it is complete, essentially means completing. It doesn’t exist until it’s complete. So you invest a lot and then it doesn’t if you don’t finish it, nothing happens. And and I found his processes really interesting. And I think that whole idea of making work visible of understanding the flow of work or you know, to if you’re talking about gold rat or something like that, you’re talking about throughput, throughput and factories. It’s it’s such an interesting I love Thank you thing about how work works like how, how we improve flow, how we think about the relationships to people when they’re making work, work, all of those things. So I find it quite fascinating.

I love Seth Godin. That’s one of the people I love reading as well. That’s, that’s awesome.

Yeah, he’s and he is one of the most productive people. Wow, is he productive? What? Where can people find you, Angela?

They can find me at our website, which is collaborative leadership. team.com. And I know it’s a mouthful, Who names their company collaborative leadership team, right. So even if you type in CO lead team.com We pop right up. And being wonderfully generic is Angela Johnson. If you look for Angela Johnson on LinkedIn, probably about 30,000 people come up. But if you put in Angela Johnson Scrum, I bubble right up to the top.

Oh, perfect. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much for being on my show. It’s been such a pleasure to get to chat with you. It’s been just a joy.

Just thanks for having me. I enjoyed the conversation. Thanks again for having me.

—

It’s been so fun to be here with you today. And I love talking with Angela Johnson. It was fun to look at processes that we share things that come from Toyota, things that come from Scrum, things that come from Goldratt. And to dive into the things that we think about when we’re trying to create teams. I love the humility aspect that Angela hires for I think it’s a it’s a good trait and the idea of calling everyone a team member. Those are things that will stick with me for a long time. I challenge you to think about the things that you want on your teams and what do you want to hire for? Go experiment!

Important Links: 

• Angela Johnson – LinkedIn
• Collaborative Leadership Team – Website

Angela Johnson

Angela is a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) and Certified Less Practitioner (CLP) and author of “The Scrum Master Files: secrets every coach should know”.

Angela helps others successfully implement Scrum and Agile to achieve their goals and objectives. Clients that Angela has transformed include: agency/services, software, hardware, marketing, learning and development and more.

The breadth and depth of her experience extends beyond Scrum and includes Kanban, eXtreme Programming, Facilitation and Organizational Change for business agility.

A graduate of Hamline University (B.A.) and the University of St. Thomas (M.B.C.), Angela resides in Minnesota in the U.S.A.

She is loving working in the age of virtual and distributed mediums which allows her to serve in her most important roles: wife and mom.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

Join The Experimental Leader community today:

• melanieparish.com
• YouTube